Explainable Artificial Intelligence to Detect Image Spam Using Convolutional Neural Network

Image spam threat detection has continually been a popular area of research with the internet\u27s phenomenal expansion. This research presents an explainable framework for detecting spam images using Convolutional N eural Network (CNN) algorithms and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) algorithms. In this work, we use CNN model to classify image spam respectively whereas the post-hoc XAI methods including Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanation (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) were deployed to provide explanations for the decisions that the black-box CNN models made about spam image detection. We train and then evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on a 6636 image dataset including spam images and normal images collected from three different publicly available email corpora. The experimental results show that the proposed framework achieved satisfactory detection results in terms of different performance metrics whereas the model-independent XAI algorithms could provide explanations for the decisions of different models which could be utilized for comparison for the future study

Explainable Artificial Intelligence to Detect Image Spam Using Convolutional Neural Network

Image spam threat detection has continually been a popular area of research with the internet's phenomenal expansion. This research presents an explainable framework for detecting spam images using Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) algorithms and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) algorithms. In this work, we use CNN model to classify image spam respectively whereas the post-hoc XAI methods including Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanation (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) were deployed to provide explanations for the decisions that the black-box CNN models made about spam image detection. We train and then evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on a 6636 image dataset including spam images and normal images collected from three different publicly available email corpora. The experimental results show that the proposed framework achieved satisfactory detection results in terms of different performance metrics whereas the model-independent XAI algorithms could provide explanations for the decisions of different models which could be utilized for comparison for the future study.Comment: Under review by International Conference on Cyber Resilience (ICCR), Dubai 202

A Late Multi-Modal Fusion Model for Detecting Hybrid Spam E-mail

In recent years, spammers are now trying to obfuscate their intents by introducing hybrid spam e-mail combining both image and text parts, which is more challenging to detect in comparison to e-mails containing text or image only. The motivation behind this research is to design an effective approach filtering out hybrid spam e-mails to avoid situations where traditional text-based or image-baesd only filters fail to detect hybrid spam e-mails. To the best of our knowledge, a few studies have been conducted with the goal of detecting hybrid spam e-mails. Ordinarily, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is used to eliminate the image parts of spam by transforming images into text. However, the research questions are that although OCR scanning is a very successful technique in processing text-and-image hybrid spam, it is not an effective solution for dealing with huge quantities due to the CPU power required and the execution time it takes to scan e-mail files. And the OCR techniques are not always reliable in the transformation processes. To address such problems, we propose new late multi-modal fusion training frameworks for a text-and-image hybrid spam e-mail filtering system compared to the classical early fusion detection frameworks based on the OCR method. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Continuous Bag of Words were implemented to extract features from image and text parts of hybrid spam respectively, whereas generated features were fed to sigmoid layer and Machine Learning based classifiers including Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Naive Bayes (NB) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to determine the e-mail ham or spam.Comment: Accepted by 2023 the 2nd International Conference on Mechatronics and Electrical Engineering (MEEE 2023

Explainable Artificial Intelligence Applications in Cyber Security: State-of-the-Art in Research

This survey presents a comprehensive review of current literature on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods for cyber security applications. Due to the rapid development of Internet-connected systems and Artificial Intelligence in recent years, Artificial Intelligence including Machine Learning and Deep Learning has been widely utilized in the fields of cyber security including intrusion detection, malware detection, and spam filtering. However, although Artificial Intelligence-based approaches for the detection and defense of cyber attacks and threats are more advanced and efficient compared to the conventional signature-based and rule-based cyber security strategies, most Machine Learning-based techniques and Deep Learning-based techniques are deployed in the “black-box” manner, meaning that security experts and customers are unable to explain how such procedures reach particular conclusions. The deficiencies of transparencies and interpretability of existing Artificial Intelligence techniques would decrease human users’ confidence in the models utilized for the defense against cyber attacks, especially in current situations where cyber attacks become increasingly diverse and complicated. Therefore, it is essential to apply XAI in the establishment of cyber security models to create more explainable models while maintaining high accuracy and allowing human users to comprehend, trust, and manage the next generation of cyber defense mechanisms. Although there are papers reviewing Artificial Intelligence applications in cyber security areas and the vast literature on applying XAI in many fields including healthcare, financial services, and criminal justice, the surprising fact is that there are currently no survey research articles that concentrate on XAI applications in cyber security. Therefore, the motivation behind the survey is to bridge the research gap by presenting a detailed and up-to-date survey of XAI approaches applicable to issues in the cyber security field. Our work is the first to propose a clear roadmap for navigating the XAI literature in the context of applications in cyber security